The Promise of Public Value Co-Creation in Open Government : Designing IT Services for Open Government and Public Value Co-Creation

The engagement of citizens in governmental actives is the future of publicsector reforms. The private sector has already started to leverage onlinetechnology to innovate and to reinvent businesses. The move towards servicesexchange instead of goods exchange is making producers, providersand users cooperate to recognize and exploit value co-creation opportunities.The degree to which collective intelligence is leveraged could be correlatedto the value an initiative generates in the public sector. Thereby open governmentimplies a focus on value co-creation in the public sector. This thesisargues that an important purpose of opening up governments towards citizensand private business is to leverage the potential of value co-creation in asimilar fashion to that already being explored in the private sector. To explorethis phenomenon this thesis addresses the following research question:How can local government use IT services to become more open and leveragethe potential of public value co-creation?Utilizing a design science approach with interpretive philosophical assumptions,the thesis contributes to knowledge on open government and value cocreationby designing artifacts that support open government in the form ofe- and m-services. It also investigates inhibitors of public value co-creationthat may arise from the design of the artifacts